Your Web browser is probably the most-used application on your PC. You check your email in it, you write in it, you collaborate with coworkers in it, you use it to
watch cat videos.
With so much at stake, you need a browser that works well for you.
But which one is the best? We put the three major Windows browsers—Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox—through their paces and crowned an overall winner.
Browser performance
When we
looked at the browser contenders previously, we concluded that all the major browsers loaded webpages at similar speeds.
But many new Web apps and services rely heavily on HTML5 and JavaScript, so the browser makers have been spending a lot of development time making sure that their programs render such apps and services quickly and efficiently.
To gauge how well browsers handle HTML5 and JavaScript code, we subjected Chrome, IE, and Firefox to the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark and to the WebVizBench benchmark for HTML5. In addition, we tested on a PC with switchable Nvidia graphics hardware to see how each browser exploited the extra processing horsepower in the graphics card.
